Nothing
lasts forever. At a quarter nine in the evening of the
6th November 1944, a Mosquito bomber returning home from
a raid on Gelsenkirken iced up as it descended through
cloud near the small Norfolk town of East Dereham. The
plane came spiralling down towards the Norwich to
Fakenham road, and crashed right into the middle of the
village of Bawdeswell. Fortuitously, it landed right on
the village church, which it completely destroyed.

The wrecked
building had been an early Victorian church by John
Brown, which itself had replaced an 18th century
mock-classical building. The tower of the medieval All
Saints had collapsed into the church and destroyed it in
1739; as often in East Anglia, neglect of a structure
principally built of flint had led to its demise. Over
the centuries, English parish churches have always been
extensively rebuilt; the process just continued for
longer at Bawdeswell than it did elsewhere.

When the
villagers came to choose a design for their new church,
we may assume that they at least looked at something
modernist - this was, after all, the 1950s, and the
Festival of Britain was encouraging the clean lines and
light spaces that would flush away the neurotic
elaboration and darkness of much of the architecture of
the first half of the century. Barely a hundred miles
off, one of the great buildings of the century was going
up in Coventry, where the city's cathedral, formerly the
parish church of St Michael, had been gutted in the
blitz.

In fact, no
East Anglian parish churches destroyed in the Second
World War were replaced by determinedly modern, or
modernist, buildings. Some were not replaced -
there seemed little point in rebuilding those lost in the
Norwich blitz, because the city already had so many
redundant worship spaces. In Suffolk, Basil Hatcher
replaced the destroyed church at Chelmondiston in a
textbook example of Decorated Gothic. And, most famously,
at Great Yarmouth, the vast civic church of St Nicholas
was rebuilt by the eccentric Stephen Dykes Bower as if
none of the centuries from the 16th and 20th had ever
happened. It was never likely that the Bawdeswell
parishioners would be feverishly dialling up the steel
and concrete manufacturers.

Many early
19th century parish churches have not worn well; coming
before the flowering of that century's architecture, they
tend to be dark and dingy, their fittings are
anachronistic, even absurd, and there is no reason to
think the parishioners of Bawdeswell had a special
fondness for the lost building. Indeed, what they chose
to replace it seems almost a direct reaction. Rejecting
both Gothic and Modernist forms, they chose something
that is basically neo-classical, in the style of the 18th
century but with elements of a Wren City of London
church, and the flavour of New England. The material, if
you please, would not be stone but Norfolk flint and
shingle.

The architect
was James Fletcher Watson who, in his nineties, could
return to the fiftieth anniversary celebrations, and
survey his work with pride. At the time it was built, and
in the decade or so afterwards, his work, and their
choice, was scoffed at as being architecturally
illiterate, in what Betjeman once described as being
'ghastly good taste', but in fact it has stood the test
of time rather well. At this distance, there is
a Festival of Britain cleanness and light to its lines,
and although it is a very simple building it resists the
blandness of the later 1980s shopping-centre-school of
neo-classical, as found at, say, Quinlan Terry's
Brentwood Cathedral. It will last. If required, it could
still be in use for centuries.

The villagers
of Bawdeswell are unusual, of course, in that they have
had a say in what their village church looks like. Most
medieval churches, at least before the 15th century,
evolved organically as elements were replaced or added
on. In the 15th century there were some massive
rebuildings, most famously in this part of Norfolk at
nearby Salle;
but they were the gift of the great families, who most
often were attempting to enforce the orthodoxy of
Catholic doctrine, most appropriately expressed in
Perpendicular architecture. Taste didn't enter into it.

After the
Reformation, as the function of these buildings changed,
surprisingly few were completely rebuilt, or even added
to very much. East Anglia has only a handful of 17th and
18th century churches. It wasn't until the 19th century
that another great age of church building arrived.

The new
churches were most often in response to the Industrial
Revolution, which increased the population of towns, and
also created a depth of poverty and need that provided a
wake-up call for the Church of England. The Church also
had to respond to the burgeoning non-conformist
movements, as well as the return of the Catholic Church
to England after an absence of some three centuries. At
Oxford University, there was a body that urged the
reinforcing of the Church of England as a great national
church; the likes of Keble, Newman and Pusey feared that
it was becoming side-lined as a protestant sect. The
Oxford Movement, and Cambridge University's similar
Camden Society, sent out a great wave of ideas, many of
them concerned with the connection between architecture,
liturgy and doctrine. The Church of England underwent a
great revival, and in East Anglia this is reflected in
hundreds and hundreds of church restorations, some of
them excellent, many of them fascinating, a few perfectly
dreadful.

Where there
was money and a will to do so, parish churches were
occasionally completely rebuilt in the late Victorian
period. Sometimes, this responded to a real need if the
church was very badly decayed, or remote from the centre
of population. But often, it reflected the enthusiasm of
a Rector with a rich patron. Sometimes, as at Booton, the
Rector and the patron were one and the same person.

The Reverend
Whitwell Elwin had inherited the Booton living on the
death of his cousin, and would remain there for more than
half a century. He was a nationally noted man of letters,
the editor of the High Tory Quarterly Review,
and a regular commentator and correspondent in the London
press. It is said that the Booton postbox was installed
by the Post Office specifically to meet his personal
letter-posting needs. Over the course of about 25 years,
he turned Booton parish church from a homely medieval
building into a fantastic palace, with towers and
minarets on the outside, and hosts of angels on the
inside, the woodwork and stained glass spectacular in
nature, the fittings elaborate and of the highest
quality.

To see it
now, you might think that Elwin was a high Anglican,
perhaps even an Anglo-catholic; in fact, this appears not
to have been the case. He was, rather, an individualist,
an English Eccentric, who used as models for the angels
in the windows his many intimate young female friends,
his 'blessed girls', as he called them. With two of them,
he toured the cathedrals of England looking for
architectural forms to use; one of them contributed, over
the course of ten years, almost £300,000 to the project,
about six million pounds in today's money. Meanwhile, his
evangelically-minded wife kept the rectory, which he
himself designed, devoid of carpets and curtains.

The quality
of Elwin's work is superb - but of course, there is no
longer a congregation. He has been immortalised by it,
but his church is now redundant, and in the care of the
Churches Conservation Trust.

Booton church
is a vision of heaven - or, at least, the Reverend
Whitell Elwin's vision of heaven. As a fully paid up
member of the squirearchy, he was sending a pretty strong
message to his congregation. We can only guess at his
influence, or that of other Victorian clergymen, over the
imaginations of the parishioners. For a medieval Priest,
things would have been quite different. Medieval worship
was less congregational, more devotional, and the role of
the Priest at Mass was not so much to lead worship as to
embody it. His was the chancel; its upkeep was his
responsibility, and certainly by the late middle ages it
had become his exclusive domain. The nave was the place
of the parish; they built it, and it was the people who
fitted it out for the devotions and rituals that Catholic
worship demanded, most particularly the sacraments of the
Church. Here, parishioners could follow their personal
devotional path, albeit in public, in the presence of the
Host.

As the middle
ages proceeded, the furnishings and decorations of the
nave seem increasingly to suggest an enforcement of
Catholic orthodoxy, in contrast to these personal
devotions, and perhaps superstitions, of the ordinary
people. Where does this come from? Was it imposed from
above? Or was it the increasing influence of the great
landed families that brought it to bear? Whatever, it is
in the 15th century that worshippers begin to become a
corporate body.

How is
Catholic orthodoxy reflected in the decoration of these
late medieval buildings? Once the Black Death had been
survived,there seems to be a change in the priorities of
the medieval mind. Images in stone, glass and paint
become increasingly concerned with doctrine and with
cathechetical tools. At Heydon, the north aisle is taken
up with an immense late 14th century image of the Three
Living and the Three Dead; three knights out hunting meet
three corpses in increasing states of decay. As you
are, so once were we, they are told. As we are,
so you will be. Is this just a warning about the
inevitability of death, and a call to repentance? Or,
more subtly, a meditation on the transitoriness of
worldly things? For the medieval mind, death did not come
as an end; rather, it was a transition. Dead parishioners
were still called to mind as members of the community;
they were prayed for, and it was assumed that they were
still praying for the living. Wealth was not forever, and
immortality existed for all, as long as praying for the
dead did. The material world was a temporary thing, a
passing shadow.

Also
surviving at Heydon is a beautiful image of the adoration
of the Magi, once part of a sequence of events in the
story of Christ. Why were these made? It is too
simplistic to think of them as some kind of 'poor man's
bible', superceded once parishioners had access to the
vernacular written word. Rather, they were devotional
tools, to be meditated upon, almost certainly as part of
a rosary sequence. It was important enough that Mass was
happening. There was no call to participate in what the
Priest was doing; rather, this was the time to pray
devotedly and silently, beads in hand, eyes focused on
the walls. Worship was active, not passive.

Curiously, as
at so many churches, the Heydon wall paintings are
punched through by later windows which were placed there before
the Reformation. It is as if, during the 15th century,
the need for the public manifestation of private
devotions came to an end, and was gradually overtaken by
an increasingly passive, corporate act of worship. It is
no coincidence that this was the time that pulpits first
appeared, and the roods were built larger and higher,
filling the east end of the nave, a constant reminder of
the central mystery of the Christian faith. With the
coming of the pulpit, the Priest left his chancel and
entered the domain of the people, taking it over. All
eyes were fixed on him now. The paintings could be
whitewashed, perhaps a century before the Reformation,
and the great Perpendicular windows filled the nave with
light, the plowman gazing in wonder on the rood, his
attention gained, his head buzzing with ideas that may or
may not have been beyond his comprehension. There would
be no going back.